Dishoom, the Bombay-café-inspired restaurant group with some of the longest queues in London, has confirmed its eighth site in the capital — and it is a landmark: the Grade II-listed Hop Exchange at 24 Southwark Street, directly opposite Borough Market.
A Victorian icon gets a Bombay makeover
The restaurant will occupy two floors of the West Wing of the 1867 building, plus a covered verandah, in what was once the trading centre of Britain’s hop industry, where merchants bought and sold the harvest that fuelled the capital’s breweries. The building — known for its dramatic glass ceiling and now largely given over to offices — was most recently home on its ground floor to Bavarian beer hall Katzenjammers, which closed in August 2025 after 16 years.
Plans were submitted to Southwark Council last year, and Dishoom says it looks forward to “becoming part of the neighbourhood and welcoming guests later this year”. No precise opening date has been announced.
Black daal meets Borough Market
For the uninitiated, Dishoom’s menu of black daal simmered overnight, gunpowder potatoes and its cult bacon naan roll has made the group one of British hospitality’s great success stories since the first café opened in Covent Garden in 2010. The London estate spans Carnaby, Shoreditch, Canary Wharf, Kensington, Battersea and King’s Cross, with regional outposts in Edinburgh, Birmingham and Brighton. The Borough site will be the group’s eighth in London and eleventh overall, following the first Leeds venue opening next month — and a New York debut is slated for 2027.
The location choice is fascinating. Borough Market is arguably Britain’s most famous food destination, drawing millions of visitors a year, and the surrounding streets have become one of the city’s most competitive restaurant districts. Dishoom’s arrival will intensify that competition — and likely lengthen the area’s already impressive weekend queues.
What it means for the neighbourhood
For the Hop Exchange, the deal secures a high-quality, high-footfall tenant for a listed building that has struggled to find its post-Katzenjammers identity. For Borough, it adds a heavyweight name to a market ecosystem that has been evolving rapidly, with new openings and closures reshaping the area each season.
Dishoom restaurants typically create well over a hundred jobs per site, and the group’s reputation for staff welfare — including its much-publicised charity meal programme, which donates a meal for every one served — has made it one of the sector’s most desirable employers. London’s dining scene is enjoying a remarkably energetic summer, as our roundup of July’s wave of new restaurant openings shows. When the doors open later this year, expect the queue on Southwark Street to become a landmark of its own.
The group has form with heritage buildings — its King’s Cross restaurant occupies a Victorian railway transit shed and its Kensington site a former Barkers department store corner — and the Hop Exchange conversion will be watched closely by conservation groups and restaurateurs alike. If the formula holds, one of Southwark’s grandest and most underused interiors is about to become one of its busiest.
